Fitness Guru Among Four Killed in Iraq

By MASON STOCKSTILL, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES - After serving 12 years in the Navy, Scott Helvenston started a career as a fitness instructor and worked as trainer and stunt man for such movies as "Face/Off" and "G.I. Jane."





He helped prepare actress Demi Moore for her role as the first woman to join the Navy SEALs in "G.I. Jane," and appeared on two reality series: "Man vs. Beast" and "Combat Missions."


But after years out of the service, friends said they weren't surprised to learn the former SEAL had left the comfort of his life in California behind him and headed for Iraq (news - web sites).


"That's what, in a time of need, true American warriors like Scott would do," "Combat Missions" producer Mark Burnett said Thursday.


Helvenston, 38, was among four American civilian contractors killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in an ambush on Wednesday, their charred bodies mutilated and dragged through the streets. The contractors were working for Blackwater Security Consulting when their vehicle was hit by rocket-propelled grenades.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040402/ap_on_re_mi_ea/civilian_deaths&cid=540&ncid=1478

Getting the starving children and families of Iraq more fit.

He wanted to kick ass so he got assigned to a kick-ass unit.

No slight to potential patriotism, warrior spirit, etc., but the bucks can be awfully tempting, especially when it's doing what you're trained for and get off on.

An adrenaline thing, perhaps, lucratively enabled. I would guess three or four times as much comp as he would get as a military operator.

Bummer for Helvenston and his buds.

Bummer for the perps, too; their ass is grass.

Bummer all around.

To kill people.

They're not taking out contracts or anything, they're just dodging IEDs and AK rounds. I wouldn't particularly want that job for $1000/day or even $10,000 a day.

CBS---paging CBS or Fox---

It conjures an image of a construction worker or engineer. "Mercenary" has unsavory connotations, but it is interesting that there are all these private, armed personnel there. It makes sense that they would be an easier target.

There are 10,000 of these armed whatever in Iraq, but I don't think its quite right to call them mercenaries. There's no evidence they're being paid to attack anyone, they're simply very well trained security guards with large caliber weapons. If I had to guess, I'd wager that many probably work for the CIA. I don't think that's especially conspiratorial either.

I too have thoughht that the word is not quite fit, since - ostensibly - they are not running offensive ops. At the same time, I think "security guard" is a bit off as well, since they are in a war zone, and they are taking a direct side in that war zone, even if it is primarily defensive in nature. "Contractor," while technically correct at a rather high level of abstraction (they are indeed operating under a private contract for pay), is certainly misleading as to specific activities.

But rather than quibble, I think the difficulty of naming their roles precisely should be read productively. I think it indicates a certain newness to this kind of activity. I'm certainly not arguing for an absolute novelty (I'm sure we can find operators doing more or less the same thing in both the recent and distant past), but it does scramble our categories a bit. These guys are not Alden Pyle, but I am reminded of the passage in Michael Herr's Dispatches:

"There had been Ivy league spooks who'd gone mucking around in jeeps and beat-up Citroens, Swedish K's across their knees, literally picnicking along the Cambodian border, buying Chinese made shirts and sandals and umbrellas. There'd been ethnologue spooks who loved with their brains and forced that passion on the locals, whom they'd imitate, squatting in black pajamas, jabbering in Vietnamese. there had been one man who "owned" Long An Province, a Duke of Nha Trang, hundreds of others whose authority was absolute in hamlet complexes where they ran their ops until the winds changed and their ops got run back on them. There were spook deities, like Lou Conein, "Black Luigi, " who (they said) ran it down the middle with the VC, the GVN, the Mission and the Corsican Mafia; and Edward Landsdale himself, still there in '67, his villa a Saigon landmark where he poured tea and whiskey for second-generation spooks who adored him, even now that his batteries were dead. There were executive sppoks who'd turn up at airstrips and jungle clearings sweating like a wheel of cheese in their white suits and neckties; bureau spooks who sat on dead asses in Dalat and Qui Nhon, or out jerking off in some New Life Hamlet; Air America spooks who could take guns or junk or any kind of death at all and make it fly; Special Forces spooks running around in a fury of skill to ice Victor Charlie."

Maybe we need to add a new category to our list...;-)

Really, I don't see the distinction. Armies fight offensively and defensively. You don't think its "offensive" to provide security for an accupying power? I think they are mercenaries in every sense of the word.

We are becoming more and more like the Roman empire, now instead of patriot soldiers who fight out of duty, we have highly paid mercenary armies. We allow immigrants to join our army and give them citizneship for it, just like the late Roman empire.

Armies use offensive AND defensive actions. Until these operatives are initiating raids on suspected insurgent areas, they fail to meet what I think would be a clear threshhold of offensive action.

But, as I said in my post, the situation is tricky, and I think - given our usual understandings of some terms (security guard, mercenary, offensive, etc.) - these cats fall betwixt and between, as it were. So I'm not really saying that they are NOT mercenaries, but neither can we say that they ARE mercenaries. That was my only point. Now, we can either extend the concept of "mercenary," extend the concept of "security guard," or come up with a new designator to deal with these types of folks. But I think you'd have to do that kind of definitional work.

that describes them. "Mercenary" isn't any more accurate than "contractor," although it does avoid the clinical detachment. How about Freikorps?

Those were basically mercenaries, no? Street thugs even, as I understand it. Weren't they comprised mainly of disgruntled, unemployed veterans during the 20's and 30's. I'm associating it with the fascist-leaning Frei Korps of Germany, of course.

They were out of the way by the early 1920s. Its probably overly perjorative. And they weren't quite fascists, they were ideology-free thugs, although they did supress the 1918 Communist revolutions.

in February-March 1920, (and "dissolved" in 1921) although they clearly morphed into other social groups in the Weimar period, among them the Sturmabteilung. Given the right wing leadership, I'd hesitate to call them "ideology free." As you say, they put down the Communist (and, to some extent, Socialist) uprisings of 1918-1919 - too bad for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, ja? A really nice analysis can be found in Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, vol. 2.

mercenary is not 100% accurate. According to dictionary.com

mer·ce·nar·y ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mûrs-nr)
adj.
1. Motivated solely by a desire for monetary or material gain.
2. Hired for service in a foreign army.

These guys are armed and in a war zone. In my mind they are there to fight. So what is the proper label?

I don't have one. That's the problem.

I floated Freikorps. Anybody have other ideas?

;-)

corporate combatant
privatized fighter
privatized veteran
privatized navy seal
privatized retired marine
privatized soldier

Chief Warrior Officer
Senior Vice President of Aggression
Director of Testosterone Channeling
Chairman of the Board of Warriors
Director of Aggression

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/p/ScottHelvenston-1056665/

Scott Helvenston God rest his soul, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I refuse to feel sorry for someone who sticks their hand in a Garbage Disposal and then complains when someone flips the switch

That would imply a tendency to not observe rules of engagement or to commit atrocities. I think "private security personnel" would be more appropriate. But there is something strange about this. I guess this occurred in Vietnam though, as well.

how could he expect to top that in his life?

targeted.